Through the cake-hole

Laura Thompson reviews The Hungry Years by William Leith.

Laura Thompson

12:01AM BST 01 Aug 2005

The subject of this book is compulsion and it is compulsively readable. I gulped it down in a couple of greedy bites, rather in the way that William Leith tells us he used to eat his food. But his book is a good deal more substantial than the sugar rushes he once craved. It is a powerful memoir with areas of real depth.

Leith is a successful journalist who has lived a parallel shadow-life in the grip of various addictions: food, above all, but also drink, drugs and - when he was thin enough to be in the market - women. The Hungry Years relates all this in detail that is hard to resist, not least because one can hardly believe Leith is willing to bare quite so much of his soul, and indeed body ("when I pull my T-shirt over my hot, swollen torso, it feels like rolling on a condom…"). If addiction is about self-laceration then writing about addiction is surely even more so.

Part of the fascination is that the subject of the book is more usually found in female territory. Women are traditionally the dieters and bingers in our society, so passages such as this seem doubly forceful, doubly mortifying, coming as they do from a man: "I'm in a hurry. The toast is brown. Damn. Still, I put two slices in the toaster, and, while I'm waiting, I take another slice from the loaf, butter it, fold it over, and eat it in three bites. I pop the toast, to see if it's nearly done, but it's not - nowhere near - so I butter another slice, and try, and fail, to eat it slowly… I am in a toast frenzy."

The Hungry Years will probably sell itself on this novelty factor: wow, men raid the fridge too! And yes, it does belong to the modern genre of male confessional literature, alongside books such as Nigel Slater's Toast (aptly enough), in which the author is obsessed with himself in what would once have been called a womanly way. But whereas these books can often be clever manipulators of their own sincerity, Leith's book is truly sincere: at times, alarmingly so.

Because of this, it is susceptible to mockery. Brave books usually are. There is, for example, something slightly giggly about the solemn interspersing of passages on coke-snorting and promiscuity ("I wake up naked, I think alone…") with those on gobbling down "chunky fries and roast potatoes". The point, though, is that drugs and sex and compulsive carbohydrate-eating are linked. "Around the world, obesity is concurrent with the increased incidence of these things: TV, mobile phones, cars, multi-storey buildings, computers, pornography… depression, increased consumption of serotonin-enhancing drugs such as Prozac and Seroxat, increased incidence of self-harm, shopping malls, painkillers in bright, shiny packets…"

Most powerful of all is the way Leith describes emptiness: the emptiness of being hungry, of being sated, of getting what you want, of not getting what you want, above all the emptiness he feels when he begins to be cured of his addictions (by Dr Atkins, no less). "My hunger subsides. After a couple of days, I stop thinking about food all the time. After a week I only think about food a couple of hours a day, at meal times. And I must say, not being hungry all the time is a strange feeling, strange and slightly disconcerting… I walk into the kitchen, and it's as if something is amiss - I'm not hungry. Temporarily, I am without a purpose…"

Here, surely, he is getting to something: about the nature of a society that does not so much live as consume, which without consumption is at a total loss, yet whose urges evaporate like so many Cheshire cats at the moment of consumption. Ironically, The Hungry Years belongs to this world, too. It is a fast read, well-packaged, full of guilty pleasures, whose semi-resolution leaves the reader a little dissatisfied. But it has the unusual qualities of heart and daring. In the end, these are what stay inside you.